Bamboo and Blood by James Church Page A

she ripped you apart, tore huge chunks out of your existence before you had time to shout for help. Even now, when her tone was so deadly flat, her face was round and her cheeks dimpled. The smile might be unreal, but the dimples weren’t. The dimples killed me. They were mantraps.

    All the conversations we’d ever had came back at me. On our walk the other day, I only remembered a few things, snatches of emotions. Now, with her sitting so close, everything was accessible. I frantically rewound all the tapes in my head, trying to remember with precision, to wade through the flood of memory onto something solid, to someplace where I couldn’t see her dimples. She didn’t help; she just sat and looked into my eyes. Walking beside the river, putting our steps in rhyme, I didn’t really have to look at her. Anyway, she had been all business. Mostly all business. But now she was across from me, looking into my eyes. She read everything. Nothing escaped her. That was always the problem. That’s probably why they put her in personnel.

    There had been a time when I considered poking them out, my eyes, so she couldn’t read me. It was the only solution that I could think of short of killing myself, which I didn’t want to do at the time. Now this. First the Man with Three Fingers reappears, and now this. I should have done it; I should have poked my eyes out when I had the chance.

    “No,” I said and should have left it at that, but with her, I couldn’t leave things. When she sat there, dimples and all, I was compelled. “Imean, yes, of course I’m happy to see you.” I hoped that was all my eyes were saying. “Yes and no.” I was talking too much. “No, I’m not empty. I just learned to let go.”

    “Really? And where did you learn that? After all those years, where did you learn that?”

    “Self-taught. Maybe it comes with age.” I stared at my hands. They seemed familiar, which was a relief. “You look good. It’s nice to see you again. So soon, I mean. Twice in so short a time.”

    “You’re a liar. I could always tell when you lied to me, especially when you were talking to your hands.”

    “You make it sound like it happened a lot.”

    “It was constant, only you didn’t know it because you had no idea who you were then. And that’s putting it nicely.”

    “And now?”

    She stood up and moved closer, right next to me; I could feel myself filling and emptying again, like a minor star pulsing in a faraway corner of the universe.

    “You just stopped.” She was barely whispering. “All of a sudden, you never got in touch. It was like you had died.”

    “I was, sort of, dying. It was death, in a way.” I didn’t mean to whisper, too, but what else could I do? How can you talk normally when someone like her is leaning so close? “I thought about calling, but you know I don’t have a phone in my apartment. I didn’t know what to do.”

    “Your office doesn’t have a phone?” She moved back and looked at my desk. I felt my face get hot. We used to talk a lot while I was at the office. I’d shut the door, and Pak didn’t interrupt. If he passed by when I was on the phone, he’d listen for just a moment and then walk away. He never mentioned it.

    “Private calls.” My voice was returning little by little, but my face was still flushed, probably my ears, too. “They don’t want us to make private calls from the office. You know that, it’s in the handbook that your section puts out. Only official matters are supposed to take place on official phones. That’s the rule.” I sounded like the book of regulations that sat on the floor behind my chair. “Anyway, what we had to say to each other in those days was nobody else’s business.”

    “So what was the other day?”

    “That was official.”

    She didn’t respond. Then came the question I hoped she wouldn’t ask. “How close were we?”

    I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to say we had almost made it, almost